The Arch Conjuror of England (12 page)

Applying ‘the sacred art’ of Kabbalah to this new realm of symbols, Dee found that the Monad's components, the ‘common astronomical symbols of the planets’, derived like letters from geometrical elements of points, straight lines and the circumferences of circles. Their proportions also evoked cosmic meanings, because he believed that the planetary symbols, like letters, were not mere human conventions but ‘imbued with immortal life’. Dee asserted that ‘any tongue’ could express the symbols’
‘special meanings’ by ‘hieroglyphic’ writing that disentangled their geometric structure. Dee had restored these symbols’ ‘mystical proportions’ by enclosing them in the Monad, which looked like the symbol for Mercury with the additional pointed hook of Aries. God had used Dee to restore astronomy, and indeed all disciplines, to original purity by this new kind of writing, the ‘real Kabbalah’. It would reveal the meanings in the Monad hieroglyph by rearranging its component parts.
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Feeling inspired, Dee unfolded the Monad to reveal the divine secrets hidden in Creation. ‘Real’ Kabbalah thus used the Monad to explain to grammarians the reasons behind the shapes of Hebrew, Greek and Latin letters, their positions in the alphabet, and their numerical values. By rearranging the Monad, the ‘real’ kabbalist could show how numbers were not just abstractions but concrete entities: they derived their shapes from the structure of Creation. Geometers would be astonished to learn how to square the circle, while the Monad could yield celestial harmonies for the musician, the orbits of the heavenly bodies for the astronomer, and the perfect form of burning mirrors for the optical mechanic. In theory it also rearranged the traditional order of the elements, placing earth below air but above water and fire.

Dee claimed that his ‘real’ kabbalistic revelations would bring about the Apocalypse by converting the Jews. To prepare for this event the hieroglyphic Monad concealed at its centre ‘a terrestrial body’, Dee's coy allusion to the philosopher's stone. The Monad symbol instantly taught the initiated that the celestial bodies it collectively symbolised activated that concealed body by the perfect balance of their rays. A ‘great compendium’, the Monad also encrypted knowledge to perfect medicine and ‘scrying’, whether using reflections in water to perceive everything on earth or gazing into carbuncles or rubies to reveal the regions of air and fire.
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In the
Monas
Dee applied ‘real Kabbalah’ to reveal profound secrets through both constructing and deconstructing his hieroglyph. He constructed its ‘head’ from a point extended to a line then rotated into a circle. As in kabbalistic
notarikon
, where parts represent the whole, this circle with a central point represented the sun orbiting the Earth, while
also symbolising the sun and gold. Adding a half-circle to the sun's orbit symbolised the moon and silver. The lower, elementary, part of the Monad shows not divine circles, but only straight lines forming a cross.

Dee analysed the four arms of the cross as kabbalists used
tsiruf
, rearranging words to discover other words. Dee, following Trithemius, replicated the Pythagorean ‘tetractys’, the equation 1+2+3+4 = 10. The cross denoted the four elements (earth, water, air and fire), the four qualities (cold, hot, dry and moist), and many other Pythagorean fours. Dee frequently emphasised that his initial stood fourth in all three divine alphabets. Just as kabbalists interchanged numbers and letters in
gematria
, so Dee showed how the cross also includes 1 (the point), 2 (the line ended by two points), 3 (two lines crossing at right angles and their shared point). Therefore, the cross (1+2+3+4) adds up to 10, meaning Unity, which explained why in Roman numerals X, a cross-shape, represents 10. Numerology also determined the place of the letter ‘x’ in the alphabet, because (1+2) × (3+4) = 21.
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Dee constructed the ‘foot’ of the Monad from the astronomical sign of Aries, which symbolised fire, the alchemical art, and the ‘fiery trigon’, the formation in which the superior planets opposed each other as they passed through the three ‘fire’ constellations of the zodiac. Dee taught that a new world would suddenly emerge in the ‘fiery trigon’ in 1584.
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He expected the Habsburgs to lead it.

Dee then revealed the Monad's ‘kabbalistic anatomy’ by removing components different from those he used to construct it. He derived the seven planetary symbols from it to demonstrate lunar and solar influences, continuing with a section heavy with subtle and unsubtle alchemical allusions to the making of gold and the philosopher's stone.
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He then constructed other zodiacal hieroglyphs, indicating how to strengthen normal heavenly rays for alchemical effects.

Deconstructing the ‘X’ by
gematria
, Dee, like Paracelsus, turns it into ‘V’ and ‘V’. Interpreting ‘V’ as the Roman numeral for 5, ‘V’ squared (5 × 5) becomes XXV, or 25, explaining why ‘V’ needs to be the twentieth letter of the Latin alphabet and the fifth vowel, interchangeable with ‘U’ in Dee's day. Turned slightly, ‘V’ becomes ‘L’, also the Roman numeral for
50. In Roman numerals, V times X (the letter with which Dee started) also produces L, or 50. Breaking the number ‘50’ into the numerals ‘5’ and ‘0’, Dee then transposes them into letters. He combines ‘E’ (the fifth letter of the Roman alphabet) and ‘L’ (ten letters from both A and X) to make ‘EL’, one of God's scriptural names, hidden within the Latin alphabet.

At length, having shown how the Monad also concealed the shapes of alchemical laboratory vessels, Dee produced from ‘X’ the number 252, which he associated with the philosopher's stone. Like the shining crystal in the great cross at St Dunstan's that Dee had seen daily as a child, the stone lay where the arms of the cross intersected in the Monad. This position reflected its perfect temperate balance among all the elements and cosmic influences, and connected to Dee's veneration of the sign of the cross in prayer.
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At this point even Dee's inspiration flagged and he addressed Maximilian directly about the philosopher's stone. Though Dee was obviously angling for patronage, like many other European ‘cosmopolitan’ alchemists he expected dramatic reforms from Maximilian.
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Dee proclaimed to Maximilian that in those perilous Last Days the Habsburgs should possess the ‘Unity’, that marvellous medicine capable of healing a divided and declining world. By kabbalistically observing every ‘jot and tittle’ of the elemental cross, Dee managed to make it refer to the philosopher's stone in other ways. He beseeched God to forgive him for publishing so great a secret, even to Maximilian. For the King or some other Habsburg ruler might become ‘very great by this interpretation of mysteries’.
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Within six months Maximilian became Holy Roman Emperor. Dee believed he was offering the potential ruler of the world a truly tremendous gift. As we shall see in the next chapter, when Maximilian proved unresponsive, Dee and others turned to Queen Elizabeth.

M
AXIMILIAN IGNORED
Dee's
Monas
, if he ever saw it. Therefore, in July 1564 Dee returned to England as medical escort to the dying Elizabeth Parr, Marchioness of Northampton. Her father George Brooke, Lord Cobham, was cousin to Thomas Wyatt, so Dee owed this appointment to family ties through the Wildes of Gravesend. In December the Marchioness used her friendship with the Queen to obtain a promise of the Deanery of Gloucester for Dee. However, Parr's death the following April contributed to another of Dee's many patronage defeats during the reign. Elizabeth kept the Deanery vacant so she could take the income.
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A larger contribution to this setback was that Dee's absence had enabled his enemies to embellish his dark reputation as a persecuting Catholic ‘conjuror’, thanks to the events behind the Witchcraft Act of 1563. These events involved the political uses of magic, which have never been linked to Dee's biography before.

On 14 April 1561 the Gravesend Customs officers had arrested John Coxe, alias Devon, a Catholic priest trying to leave England for the Netherlands. Coxe carried letters to leading Catholic exiles, and his suspiciously timely arrest enabled Cecil to thwart Robert Dudley's hopes of marrying Elizabeth with Spanish support.
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For Coxe's confessions enabled Cecil to assemble evidence of Catholic plots against Elizabeth, allegedly inspired by Coxe and other priests conjuring, yet again, ‘how long the
Queen shall live’. Within weeks Cecil had convinced Elizabeth that they had predicted her imminent death and conjured demons to kill her.
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This supported Cecil's vigorous argument, which he would reiterate throughout the reign, that Catholic ‘superstition’ inevitably entailed traitorous magic. To destroy the reputations of several surviving Marian Privy Councillors, Cecil used interrogations designed to uncover an international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth.
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He punished all the Catholic ‘conjuring’ priests with maximum publicity, displaying them in London pillories in June 1561, because he already had a larger aim in mind. Over the next sixteen months he carefully nurtured an even more dangerous version of this plot to fruition in October 1562. He possibly hoped to connect Robert Dudley with conjuring for political intelligence. Dudley had assured some courtiers that ‘conjurators’ were lawful, especially those who conjured ‘good angels’, though there is no proof he meant Dee.
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The Catholics arrested through Coxe's confessions included Lord Hastings of Loughborough and Arthur Pole, the nephew of Cardinal Pole. Hastings had encouraged Arthur Pole's hasty marriage with the Earl of Northumberland's sister, strengthening Pole's Catholic claim through his Plantagenet descent.
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Elizabeth pardoned Hastings and soon released Pole. Cecil hoped that Pole, ‘not very prudent, but spirited and daring’ according to the Spanish ambassador, might implicate other Catholics in his schemes, even the most serious Catholic claimant to England's throne, and Cecil's perennial obsession, namely Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots.
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Cecil knew that Pole's brother-in-law, Anthony Fortescue, had been implicated in November 1558 in John Prestall's conjuring about Elizabeth's imminent death, which Dee had been called in to counteract. Cecil inserted a spy into the group, Humphrey Barwick, later rewarded as ‘the Queen's servant’.
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However, Elizabeth fell dangerously ill with smallpox in early October 1562, forcing Cecil to spring his trap prematurely on 14 October, when her disease reached crisis point. Frightened by the prospect of an uncertain succession dividing the Privy Council, Court and political nation, Cecil arrested the conspirators as an immediate argument against Catholic Mary's succession. Once Elizabeth recovered and called Parliament for
the New Year, Cecil found further uses for his prisoners. He had captured Fortescue, Arthur Pole and his brother Edmund, Barwick, and two servants to Lord Hastings, just before they embarked for Flanders. Cecil alleged they were hatching a scheme whose boundless optimism typifies Elizabethan Catholic plots, at least those involving Cecil's agents when his political agenda required Catholic threats.

According to Cecil, the plotters intended to kill Elizabeth and make Mary queen, aided by Mary's French uncles of the House of Guise. On arrival in Flanders, Arthur Pole would reclaim his ancestral title of Duke of Clarence, marry Edmund Pole to Mary, obtain an army of six thousand troops from the Guise, invade Wales in May 1563, raise rebellion in England and enthrone Mary. Cecil claimed they sought papal assistance. As an added bonus Fortescue allegedly implicated the Spanish and French ambassadors, asking for aid from their Catholic sovereigns.
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There is little evidence that the Poles actively supported Mary then, and none that the Spanish would help the French to conquer England through her. But connecting the Poles with Mary perfectly suited Cecil's purposes. It immediately enabled him to quell Elizabeth's lingering doubts about aiding the French Protestants, newly revolted against their King. It also offered useful propaganda to sway the forthcoming Parliament. A month after their arrest Cecil informed Sir Thomas Smith that ‘the matter of the Pooles here shall not be meddled withal until Parliament’.
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Just before Parliament met, Cecil rekindled hysteria about the plot by accusing the Spanish ambassador of encouraging it.
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When Parliament opened on 12 January 1563, Lord Keeper Bacon's speech for the Queen told a packed House of Lords, with the Commons thronging at the doors, about the continuing threat from the Guise ‘with a devilish conspiracy within our selves tending to the aid of the foreign enemy, and by their own confession to have raised a rebellion within this realm’.
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Cecil hoped to use the plot to persuade Elizabeth to marry, or at least exclude Mary from the succession. Badly frightened by Elizabeth's narrow escape from death, the Privy Councillors combined with most of the Commons and Lords on 28 January to petition her to avoid civil war by naming her successor. They believed that Mary Stuart was now beyond
the pale.
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The petition reveals how Cecil used Arthur Pole's connection to Mary Tudor's former Privy Councillors to emphasise that the magical plot threatened Protestantism. The Commons knew that the traitors not only hoped ‘of the woeful day of your death’, but ‘to advance some title’, to renew their persecution against Protestants.
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When Elizabeth refused to settle the succession, Cecil used the plot to kick-start his cherished anti-Catholic legislation.
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